" In fact of course there are orthodox Jews who oppose the state of Israel on theological grounds -- including a community in Jerusalem. They hold that it's impious to jump the eschatological gun, as it were, by founding a Jewish state in Palestine before Messiah comes. Given that rabbinic Judaism is founded in reaction to -- and horror at -- the messianic Judaism that produced the disastrous wars of the first two centuries C.E., they have a good bit of the tradition on their side. --CGE"
This is true. There's a pretty interesting discussion of this in Karen Armstrong's book on fundamentalism.
Later, Max wrote --
"It wasn't derivative, and there was simply no competition. Early Zionists and orthodox lived in different worlds. The orthodox constituted entire communities. The Zionists were by contrast a little club. Until the Holocaust nobody in his right mind would expect the latter to be 'supplanted.' -mbs"
By "derivative" I meant that the Zionist notion of "peoplehood" was a modernized version of the chosen people myth. Would you disagree? And weren't the early Zionists appealing for membership to populations that the orthodox wanted to hold onto? I think you may be right in the last sentence, but still, didn't Zionism regard orthodoxy as old-hat and not up to addressing the threat of modern anti-Semitism? As I recall, Herzl's turn towards Zionism came when, as a journalist, he covered the Dreyfus trial and concluded that founding a Jewish state was the only way. In other words, he, the orthodox, and, of course, the anti-Semites all shared a view of Jews as "a people" and he decided the only useful approach to the problems that implied was to ape the racial nationalism then prevalent in many bourgeois circles in Europe, particularly to the East.
Ironically, the eventual outcome of the Dreyfus Affair tended to vindicate modern democracy as a guarantor of human rights. Admittedly it took years, poor Captain D languished on Devil's Island for an unconsciounable period of time, and so forth, but he did survive, and was reinstated in the French army. The Dreyfus affair deserves re-examination in light of the current importance of patriarchal monotheist religious ideologies both in the US and elsewhere, e.g. Al Quaeda, etc.
Christopher Rhoades Dÿkema